We mustn’t give in to hopeless pessimism
OH dear, Mr Coaker, what is it all about? Although spot on with his thoughts about much of current house building and much of national politics (“corrupted by legitimised bribes”), his column last week was so negative.
He said that the Cop26 meeting in Glasgow is nothing more than “a junket”, that “we’re hard-wired to take the easy route” and that the “problem is that there are far too many of us”.
He concluded that there is no chance that the Glasgow leaders would make any progress on the climate crisis.
I can’t believe that Mr Coaker is that dispirited about the future of his grandchildren, the sustainability of agriculture in many parts of the world, or keeping the global temperature low enough for a life worth living.
He’s just winding us up so that in his next column he can shout down those who reject his views. He’ll be railing against “wokeism” and “snowflakes”, i.e. those of us who believe it’s still possible to ameliorate the worst climate threats. If he is right, the word ‘snowflake’ will be fully relevant.
His stance makes him a close buddy of Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage climate campaigner, who said that meetings like Glasgow were merely “blah, blah, blah”. Strange bedfellows!
And if he thinks that the only demonstrators are “crusty”, he must have left his glasses in the tractor cab.
The truth of his words that “we are borrowing the world from our grandchildren” prove that we aren’t really “hard-wired to take the easy route”?
If that were true, surely we would have forgotten Christian teaching about helping each other centuries ago.
What of the Blitz spirit, Mr
Coaker? Things looked bleak in
1940 but Churchill insisted that we could overcome a global threat by international co-operation and allied leaders and populations co-operated with success against all odds.
There’s our model of what can be done with some reality-based optimism.
He mustn’t try to persuade us to give up just “because there are too many of us”. There’s all that talent in our populations and there is a glimmer of hope.
People who reject his defeatism are “taking a jab of common sense” against the throwaway society, against the domination of fossil fuel companies and their “greenwashing” pretensions and in favour of sustainable energy.
The signs are there – people sharing electric bikes and cars in Exeter; the growth of offshore wind farms; and people in the South West eating more vegetables (provided the growers can find the necessary workers).
There’s the target for Mr Coaker’s anger – this careless Government, who don’t seem to care about Brexiting our agriculture.
In the same edition of the WMN, Tory shambolic incompetence over chucking out EU support for our farmers and replacing it with booster Boris “policies” was worryingly explained.
But to give in to hopeless pessimism and not care about killing the beauty of nature and the other world species to whom we owe the chance of survival, is not something we should have to read about.
There is hope, Mr Coaker!
Jeremy Hall
Exeter